Google can't be trusted with our books

The threat to Google Videos shows businesses are not suitable cultural custodians – they can't be held accountable to the public

'Entrusting such vast cultural archives to a body that has no explicit responsibilities to protection, archiving, and public cultural welfare is inherently dangerous' Photograph: Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Google announced last week that it would be deleting the content of the Google Videos archive. After a public outcry, it said it would work on saving all the video content and making it available elsewhere. In this instance, the public managed to change Google's mind and stopped the mass deletion of a unique digital archive but the situation raises concerns about data under Google's control, including the unique archive of Google Books.

The reason cited for Google Videos' closure is that the company would like to focus on its raison d'être, search, "[the] ability to let people search videos from across the web, regardless of where those videos are hosted". Shifting its priorities is its prerogative as a company: the issue is that on the basis of refocusing its business priorities, its first impulse was to delete the gigabytes of content given to it by users.

This situation has disturbing implications for Google Videos' sister project, Google Books, and the approximately 15 million scanned documents in the archive. In partnership with some of the greatest research libraries in the world – the Bodleian Library in Oxford, Harvard University Library, the New York Public Library – Google Books has built up a huge digital library containing thousands of unique documents.

Google Books has suffered problems in the past: practical problems – lawsuits from publishers and authors, criticism of its inconsistent metadata – and philosophical problems involving the theoretical concerns of allowing a private sector company to control shared cultural resources. These concerns have remained abstract but now, with the company's disregard towards videos, become more concrete.

As a private sector company, the core aim of Google is to make money. The Google Videos situation shows that in order to lower expenditure and adjust its priorities, Google was willing to delete content entrusted to it by users. Libraries have trusted Google with millions of documents: many of the books scanned by Google are not digitised or OCR-processed anywhere else and, with budgets for university libraries shrinking year after year, may not be digitised again any time in the near future. Google acted admirably by listening to users and working to save the videos but entrusting such vast cultural archives to a body that has no explicit responsibilities to protection, archiving and public cultural welfare is inherently dangerous: as the situation made clear, private sector bodies have the ability to destroy archives at a whim.

Enabling access to digital information should be one of the key responsibilities of our cultural institutions and our public sector. Keeping these resources in the public sector and ensuring that they are freely available to everyone is the key to bridging the UK's widening digital divide: the chasm between those who can access digital information via internet access at home and the 27% of households who cannot. Last week, Amazon announced that it was working with libraries in the US to allow users to borrow Kindle ebooks. This mutual co-operation between the private and the public sector should allow more people to access shared digital resources and hopefully help bridge the US digital divide.

As Peter Singer and others have argued, we need to develop a digital library that can make resources available in the same way as Google Books but that will be accountable to the public. Google Books is one of the largest digital libraries in the world but, as Robert Darnton has argued, we cannot trust it to be the sole custodian of our digital archives forever. A national digital library would be subject to regulations to protect our cultural heritage and would take responsibility for the artefacts placed in its care. Publicly funded libraries and archives are important precisely because they are not committed to the "market fundamentalism" of pursuing profit above all other motives. Some libraries and archives need to modernise and make resources digitally available but this requires support and the protection of our public sector libraries.

Google's motto is "don't be evil". Not doing the evil thing is not the same as doing the right thing. In this instance, it has done the right thing: next time, it may not.